March 30, 2024 • 37 mins
In 2018, there's a man from a lost tribe still living deep in the jungles of Brazil who has been all alone since the mid 1990s. He's referred to as the Man of the Hole, and has had no face-to-face with modern humans. Who is he? We'll answer that question as best we can in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Chuck here with a Saturday Select, bringing you one all
the way back from August twenty eighteen. A nice summer episode.
Who Is the Man of the Whole? This is very interesting.
The Man of the Holes was somebody who lived by
himself as an uncontacted human, well pretty much uncontacted. A
(00:25):
very interesting story. Sometimes I wish I was the Man
of the Whole. But check it out right now. Who
is the Man of the Hole? Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Jerome Brolind. Boy,
I'm not in a good way today, Chuck, you off
your game, as if you can't tell I think you're fine. Well, thanks, man,
I feel a lot better. Sure, Yeah, no, I'm okay.
(01:07):
I can tell you. I'm I'm surrounded by friend's family.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Like your dad's in the corner. It's weird.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I have the idea I have TV. Oh man. I
instagrammed a photo of my mom and dad from the seventies. Yeah,
and I captioned it They're like looking at each other
kind of lovingly and I captioned it the moment before
I was conceived.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
You know what Jerry showed me that today?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Oh yeah, she did. I look a lot like my
parents mixed together. Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
The first thing I noticed was like, Wow, that's that's
what Josh would have looked like as a grown man
in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Because that profile.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Of your dad, I don't know, I've never seen your
dad young, So I was like, man, that's really that's you.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah, I totally saw it. I saw both.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah. Yeah, because you look at my dad, You're like, oh,
that's Josh. But then you look at my mom, You're like, oh,
there's Josh too. Very bizarre.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah, I don't. I guess I definitely favor my father,
is that right?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Yeah, So a lot of people just favor one or
the other. But I'm fifty to.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Fifty Yep, that's kay all fifty to fifty.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah, I think that's a new one.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
There's a T shirt, Yeah, fifty to fifty Clark.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
So, oh, I know the point I was making. There's
this House Stuff Works article that you sent called The
Man in the Hole, and it talks about this guy
who is the last of his kind, he's, as this
article put it, like the loneliest person on Earth. And
I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm sure this is
(02:47):
a lot like being in solitary confinement or something like that,
but no, this is way beyond that. And this house
stuff works article byes Lynn Shields like really drove it home.
She wrote, like, what if you were the last person
who could speak your language, the last person who remembered
what Halloween was, or a Coca cola, or that a
(03:09):
dog says wolf, Like, imagine that, And I'm like, yeah,
that's way different from being in solitary. Solitary confinement would
be bad enough. You know, you're physically restrained, but at
least you'd know out there that there are other people
who know the same things you know, that speak the
same language you speak, that your family's still out there,
(03:30):
that kind of thing. This is utterly different. And this man,
the last Tribesman he's called or the Man in the Hole,
is possibly not just the last of his kind. He
might be the only person on the entire planet in
the situation that he's in. Maybe isn't that bizarre to think?
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, I mean, we did another show on are There
Undiscovered People? Quite a few years back, and I don't
know how he didn't get to this guy, but I
saw this article and it was striking, especially if you've
seen the couple of videos, and I think there are
only two pieces of video of this dude. One I
saw where they were sort of shooting, you know, they
(04:15):
were zoomed in on a hut, and that's you know,
where he lives. There's a series of thatched huts in
the Tenaru Indigenous Reserve in the Rondonia state of Brazil, YEP.
About twenty thousand acres big area of the forest in jungle.
So he lives in these thatched huts that are scattered
(04:38):
about in the middle of nowhere, and they were able
to get him on film kind of zoomed in between
the cracks and you see the guy kind of looking
a little bit, but you can't make out much. So
I saw that video and then I saw another one
where it was a pretty good shot of him from
a distance making good work trying to chop down a tree.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
That was the most recent video, which well, let's just.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Go ahead and get into this.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
He was found or discovered in I think in nineteen
ninety six when some loggers from the State of Rondonia.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Which from the impression I have, this is a very
rough and tumble state populated by loggers and cattle ranchers,
and there are very few laws from what I understand,
and things are settled by the gun. Is the impression
that I have of Rondnia. It's right smack dab in
the middle of South America, and it's extraordinarily densely jungled
(05:37):
in the Amazon.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah, I mean that.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
One New York Times article, like the guy was talking
that they were talking to said, from a helicopter, you
look down there and you think there's just no one
down there.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
It's just all jungle, he said.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
But when you get down there, he said, there's a
lot of people and drug runners and bad men everywhere.
So this guy is definitely an anomaly because he is
not hanging out with anybody.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
No. And the reason why they think he's alone, Chuck,
is because back in nineteen ninety five nineteen ninety six,
when the rumors of like a wild man in the
jungle started to circulate, they think that he had just
recently survived a slaughter that had killed off the rest
of his tribe.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Which was only like supposedly five or six people by
that point, because they think the rest had been slaughtered
and't that that's a common thing We're going to come
up on in a couple of these is these ranchers
and loggers. They're like, we want to go clear this land,
and there's a tribe, a native tribe, they're an indigenous tribe,
so let's just slaughter them, get them out of the way.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
It's really, really an awful, awful thing.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
And it's been a very common thing apparently since the
seventies and eighties, when ranchers and loggers moved into Rondonia,
just snatching up land. And this is again, this is
the Amazon. This is basically Christine Forest rainforest that people
(07:07):
who have never been contacted by anyone from the outside
world live still to this day. And this guy's one
of them. So at first they thought maybe Hughes just
a member of a tribe that we already know about, right,
And then over time as they started to study this guy,
(07:27):
it became quite clear that now Hughes, he's a member
of a tribe that we didn't know about before, and
we're pretty sure he's the last of his kind.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, So there's this organization called Funai fu NAI, the
National Indian Foundation of Brazil, and they have been tasked
with for the past twenty years monitoring this dude, and
before his companions were killed, monitoring his companions. And you
(07:57):
sent a nice follow up on FUNAI. They have a
departments and one is called the General Coordination Unit of
Uncontacted Indians the CGII, and that was established in nineteen
eighty seven and they're the only a department of government
in the world which protects indigenous peoples who don't have
(08:18):
contact with the outside world or nearby tribes.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, because before in the nineteenth century and even through
a lot of the twentieth century, there was it was
just basically Christian missionaries who were making their way into
the Amazon to contact tribes and bring them Jesus basically,
and also healthcare and food and all that stuff tools
the implements of modern culture, but also to proselytize too,
(08:44):
and there was a lot of it just wasn't very
well thought out. And as a result, even from these
these the best of intentions that a lot of these
missionaries had a lot of tribes died. So in nineteen
ten Brazil came up with their I think it was
like the Indian Protection Services was the name of the
(09:05):
department that they first came up with, and the Indian
Protection Service they took over from the missionaries, and it
was a step up in that sense because it was
more coordinated. There was thought to it, there was some
sort of study, but the point was to take uncontacted
Amazonian tribes and bring them into the modern world so
(09:30):
that they could assimilate with the modern world. The point
was to basically reduce cultural diversity in Brazil and that
kept going until the sixties when there was a huge
ExPASy about the Indian Protection Service that they had just
fallen down so terribly in their mission that there was
(09:50):
basically mass extermination, slavery, rape, everything, every horrible thing that
you can think of that could befall a human being
happened to these tribes under the watch of the Indian
Services Protection over sixty years.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
The department in nineteen eighty seven, the CGII was founded
by a man named Sidney Posuelo. I guess how you
pronounced that. And this was a big sea change in policy,
which was, like you were saying, the previous strategy established
contact to try and get them integrated at some point
(10:29):
to this new policy, which was don't even contact these
people unless they are under serious threat, because history has
shown all manner of bad things can happen when you
contact these people, one of which is certainly introducing them
to new diseases and things that will kill them that
(10:53):
they've never never seen or experienced. And this is you know,
there's a big debate still on, like what the best
policies are here.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah, So these two American anthropologists, white American anthropologists, men
who I guess, wrote an open letter in either Science
or Nature, I think Nature, basically saying Brazil and Peru
should reverse this long standing policy of not contacting Indians
(11:28):
in the Amazon and should actually plan peaceful, well organized
contact so that they can be better protected. It's these
anthropologists stants that if you don't protect them, they're going
to die one way or another. That there's no way
that they're going to remain isolated. On the long term.
(11:50):
Maybe you've got another generation possibly of some of these
tribes that could live like this, but beyond that, it's
just not going to happen. There's too many power, powerful
interests banging on the doors of their preserved areas. Who
are more than willing to hire people who will accept
money to go kill these people just to get this land.
(12:10):
And by just leaving them alone, you're leaving them very vulnerable.
Whereas if you plan out contact, then conceivably you can
show them that there are things like medical treatment, there
is better ways that you can protect them. You can
kind of give them contact, and that even more so
interviews with groups that have become have initiated contact or
(12:33):
have had contact made with them said we would have
made contact with you guys earlier, but we thought we
were going to be enslaved or murdered or something. We
had no idea that you wanted to actually help us.
Had we known that, we would have contacted you guys
decades ago. So those two things put together, these American
anthropologists have said we endorse this, and fu NI and
(12:55):
a lot of other groups, including the UN and human
rights group in the UK called Survivors International, have said, no,
that is totally disrespectful, that flies completely in the face
of agreed upon procedure and protocol. Just be quiet, you're
being neo colonialists. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I think it's interesting though, because what they're trying to
do is, like you said, have very highly controlled contact,
and the assumption that they don't want to be contacted,
at least through their eyes, appears to be false because,
like you mentioned, they're afraid of being kidnapped or something
or overtaken. And if had they known, like, oh, you
(13:36):
just want to give us some nice tools and maybe
inoculate us, and we'd actually be.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Down with that as long as you leave afterward.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Right, And these two anthropologists said, like, you've got to
do this smartly, Like you basically have to go in
with cultural translators, usually tribes who have made contact with
outsiders before, already ablished contact that live in the same area,
who might be able to translate between the outsiders and
(14:07):
the actual uncontacted tribes. And you need healthcare providers who
are going to stay there for at least a year,
at least a year of sustained care or else. Yes,
they're going to die from these diseases you're going to
bring in inevitable.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, I mean they're good.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
They give good examples too in that article about how
this is backfired with missionaries, like the your people, they
were there for six months and the missionary said, well,
let's go on vacation and then the Yora died a
few weeks later, and then in nineteen seventy five, missionaries
provided care to a community on Ake community they took
(14:47):
a vacation and then they died as well. So they're
saying like, you got to have a plan to go
in and stay there. You can't just go in, bring
them some food and machetes and acculate like spring break,
and then then get out of there. But I get
the idea that this is still a pretty hot topic
of debate.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh yeah, no, that those anthropologists, they set off a
huge debate, and I think it was sparked by the
video that was released by Survivor International of the man
and the Hole chopping down a tree. And the video
was taken in twenty eleven, but they only just released
it in July of twenty eighteen. And this is, yeah,
(15:30):
this is very much still going on, this big debate
and it's a huge it's a huge issue and you
can kind of see both sides. Like I had just
read about Fooneye's counter to it that like, look, dude,
this is our thing. We got this. You just mind
your own business. We have our own policy, stay out right,
stay out of this. Yeah, But then if you read
(15:50):
the anthropologists letters, you're like, actually, they have a couple
of good points here. So it's it's not a clear
cut a picture, sure, one way or the other. It's
definitely there's a lot of nuance to it on both sides.
All Right, let's take a respite, let's take a furlough
or a vacation.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Yeah, and we'll come back and talk a little bit
more about the man in the hole.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
All right.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
So the reason they call him the man of the
hole or the man in the hole is the odd
thing of inside these thatched huts, of which he has
several around this area. Inside the huts are these and
all over the place there are these holes with like
spikes for like trapping animals. But he has these six
foot deep holes inside of his own huts, and apparently
(16:59):
no other tribes around him have done this, and it's
very unusual thing. And the belief is that he is
it's for his own protection. I guess if he's being
fired upon or something by loggers, he can jump down
on one of these holes.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, that's the impression I have too, which is extraordinarily sad.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It is.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
So the reason why they think that that he has
these holes is because he's had terrible run ins. I
guess this seems to be evidence that he is the
survivor of a slaughter or a massacre, because this is
not a normal technique that they've seen with other tribes,
and they found it at every single one of the
(17:41):
huts that they've come upon of his.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
They do know though, from tailing him or mon tailing him,
monitoring him for the past couple of decades though, that
he he hunts with a bone arrow. He farms probably
at night and stays out of the you know, as
much as he can. Stays inside during the day out
of fear, which is also awful. But he farms like
(18:04):
papaya and corn and other fruits and vegetables. He has
all these traps set everywhere. Like I mentioned, they have
found hand carved arrowheads, torches made from branches in Resin
And at one point they actually tried to make.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Contact, yes, several points.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Well, at one point when they tried to make contact, though,
he fired upon them with his bow and arrow and
actually hit someone.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
In the chest, one of the food iye agents.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, and they were like, all right, we're out of here.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah. At that point they stopped trying to initiate contact
with this guy. And again, this is like peaceful contact
they're trying to initiate, not like hey man, get off
of this land. They're like saying, do you need anything?
Do you want some food? What do you want? And
the first few attempts to contact him resulted in him
(18:55):
just basically slipping into the shadows in the jungle and
just disappearing. Then it progressed into standoffs. Then it progressed
into a shooting, and so they stepped back. Survivor International
and FUNAI and some other groups stepped back and said,
this guy is escalating in hostilities. He's showing us he
(19:16):
doesn't want anything to do with us, like you. It
would be something if like he'd shot the first time
and then slipped away the second time and the hostilities
were decreasing, but instead it's going the opposite way. The
hostilities were increasing. So he's getting that he has the
opportunity to contact these people who are coming with their
(19:36):
hands up and like not trying to kill him, and
he's still saying back off. So finally the government said
we're just going to back off, and they backed off.
They FUNAI established his policy of not contacting this guy,
not even attempting to contact this guy, but instead monitoring him,
making sure that his preserve is protected, and then leaving
(19:59):
him things like the acts that he was seen using
in that twenty eleven video, or seeds for some of
the plants that he grows.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, which a lot of times he doesn't even accept
or take these gifts. Imagine he's not retrusting. And like
you said, as far as protecting the area, in two
thousand and seven, Funai and the government eventually increase the
area to thirty one square miles around where he was
is off limits to any trespassing or development, later expanded
(20:27):
to three thousand hectares.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So I think they added another three thousand.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Hectares, okay to the already square mileage.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
And this is really ticked off the ranchers and the
loggers because they're like, our business is being held back
by this one guy.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, and they want to kill.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Him, to kill him. As a matter of fact, when
the government announced that it was not only keeping up
the practice of preserving this guy's land thirty one square miles,
but adding an extra three thousand hectares, which brought the
total to forty two and a half square miles or
one hundred and ten square kilometers that this man has
(21:05):
to himself. The five ranches that surround this preserve hired
somebody to go try to kill him. Yeah, Fu and
I went and checked on him after a couple of
weeks after that announcement was made public, and they found
that their outpost was ransacked and that they had found
the shotgun shells spent shotgun shells in the fourth floor.
(21:26):
So there's clearly an attempt to made on the guy's life,
and for a couple of years they had no idea
if he'd survived until that video was made in twenty
eleven that showed this guy who is now fifty. They've
been tracking him since he was in his third fifties.
Now they chopping down a tree. Yeah, chopping down a
tree like it's nothing. So they knew that he was
(21:47):
alive and in good health as of twenty eleven, and
they're assuming that he's still alive.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Man, how good would a movie be about this guy?
I know, just have a lot of it play out
in silence, you know.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Yeah, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
That would be cool.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I mean, it's it's crazy to see a video of
this guy from seven years ago. Like in the world
we live in, to think about there's still places on
earth where this guy it's almost like the Japanese straggler
who had no idea that the war had been over
for whatever thirty years living in the jungle. It's just
(22:21):
amazing to think about the fact that this is the
lone the lone guy out there by himself and what
his life must be like.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
But not only that, it's like like when we did
the paramedics episode, I think I said something like, there's
there's no greater symbol of humanity than paramedics, you know,
I think this is another really great symbol of paramedics
in this guy. Well. No, the Funai Brazilian government's response
to this that this man has been part of a tribe.
(22:52):
He's the last of his tribe, and the Brazilian government
has said, this man deserves to live his life out
in peace in the way that he he wants to,
in his traditional way, to be left alone. And we're
going to designate one hundred and ten square kilometers that
belong to no one but this man. Yeah, despite the
fact that all around him is the outside world trying
(23:13):
to press in. We're going to stand in the way
of that so that this guy can live out his
natural life. That just gets me, you know, right in
the bread basket.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, I think the Disney version of this movie is
they would find alone tribeswoman somewhere, drop her off and
have them have them meet cute by the papie tree.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah, and the ranchers want to tickle him. But if
it were live action these days, it would be they
would hire either John Wayne or Fisher Stevens to play
the last time.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Fisher Stevens.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Yeah, remember he played the Indian programmer in Short Circuit.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Really well, that's right, yeah, geez.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, that was as recently as the eighties.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Right, It's not like Mickey Rooney, you playing an Asian
man in the nineteen sixties. Not like that was any better. No, boy, Hollywood,
you've been getting wrong for so long.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
They have. At least Mongol got it right though, right maybe, Yeah,
we haven't seen him reserve judgment.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, all right, We'll take another break and talk a
little bit more about some of these isolated tribes right
after this.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Okay, Chuck, So the last Tribesman, the man in the hole.
He's being left alone, and that's policy in Brazil and Peru.
From what I understand now, there are some tribes that
have actually accepted contact and have made peaceful contact and
(25:05):
have become I guess a little more integrated. I think
there's three degrees that FUNAI separates tribes into indigenous tribes
into there's totally uncontacted, which is like they are living
off on their own, they outside world has nothing to
do with them. There's partially contacted or partially assimilated, right,
(25:32):
like they're they're living in their hut in the jungle,
but they still have an iPhone, right. And then there's
fully assimilated, where they like live in a city now
or something like that, or they have like a job
in the city or something like that. So it's not
just in the Amazon. It's not just in Brazil where
there are uncontacted tribes, although that is definitely the place
(25:57):
where you're going to find the most. I think I
saw somewhere between fifty eighty and one hundred and twenty
uncontacted groups of indigenous people are presumed to be living
in the Amazon still today.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Yeah, I mean just those that random swath of numbers
shows you that they there's still so much they don't know.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
For sure, but there's there are other parts of the
world where there are uncontacted tribes, and you found an
article that ran down a few of them. One that
surprised me was just off the coast of India, on
Sentinel Island in India, North Sentinel, a.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Good ole cracked article which may have been done under
the watch of our now colleague mister Jack O'Brien. Nice
shout out to Jack and his daily Zeitgei, Zeitgei's podcast, Yeah,
which I was on.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Have you been on?
Speaker 1 (26:47):
You?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
You gotta be on. It's great, great fun. As a
matter of fact, I'm gonna lap you. I'm gonna go
on again.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah, well please.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
Do all right?
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, But the sentine Leese on North Sentinel Island, Indiana,
they don't even know if that's their real name. They
just call them that because I guess we have called
it North Sentinel Island, not you and me, but other
people who.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Named it to I think the British.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
But apparently yeah, probably. We don't know a lot about them.
But in two thousand and six, a couple of fishermen
drifted there in their boat near the island and were
killed and buried in shallow graves, and helicopters came and
they were like, we got to find this burial site
and get these guys back at least, and they started
(27:33):
firing arrows at the helicopter and it was just out
of there, and the local cops were like, now, we're
just gonna leave those guys there, We're not going near it.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
They have actually for this has been going on for
a very long time. Apparently Marco Polo remarked on them,
wrote about them. He was traveling I think the twelfth
or thirteenth century, so they've been fierce for years now,
and apparently survived the two thousand and four tsunami. Yeah,
(28:04):
Indonesia's tsunami. That's crazy because this is an island that
the tsunami just swamped and they managed to hang on
just fine.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
I think ancient people have survived more than one tsunami,
you know.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
I guess you're right. That was a pretty bad one though.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, pretty amazing. This other one, the coral Wai tribe
of Papua Indonesia. They were contacted in the seventies by
of course, missionaries and archaeologists, and they were using stone
tools and living in tree huts and stuff like that,
and their big belief as a tribe was that the
world would be destroyed by an earthquake if they assimilated
(28:43):
and changed their customs. So missionary said, all right, you
know what, We're just going to leave you alone.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
What I think these people might have invented bungee jumping?
Do you remember that land diving up isode them? They
sound really familiar.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I think it might be maybe so, But they are
in the middle of nowhere, so it's a long way
from even like other remote villages.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Which is a I mean, that's a mark in your
favor for now. But as the Amazon Basin has been
showing us since the seventies and eighties, so much of
it has disappeared due to clear cutting for ranching, logging,
that you just have no idea how much longer that's
(29:30):
going to hold up, no matter where you are in
the world. Yeah, I mean, we're at seven and a
half billion people now, and then I think the next
thirty years we're expected to hit ten billion. That's a
lot more people that not only need more land, but
also are going to be using up those resources that
are currently on that land.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Right now, you know, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
I mean, like, if they discover oil where the Krawai
tribe lives in Indonesia, there goes that isolation.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
I think that's a real danger for all tribes. I
think that's probably what those two anthropologists we're talking about.
They're saying, like, long term, we need a plan here everybody.
We can't just be like, well, we just won't contact
them because it's just not viable, I think was their point.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah, what about this one really was interesting to me.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
The Old Believers. Have you ever heard of them?
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, there's like some GQ article in the last couple
of years about that.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Are they well dressed it?
Speaker 3 (30:29):
I think so? In burlap apparently.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah, these are Soviet Well, here's the deal.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
In nineteen seventy eight, there were these geologists in the
Soviet Union that we're looking for iron ore. They were
in a helicopter and they saw a cabin way out
in the remote areas of Siberia, and they found a
family there that actually spoke a language I guess, I mean,
what would that be.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
What language?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Old timey Russian?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Old timey Russian, uh huh.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
And they were huddled in fear and they were yelling,
this is for our sins. They were dressed in burlap
and living off the land. And apparently they were a
group of people called the Old Believers, which left the
Russian Church, the main Russian church in the seventeenth century
and had been I guess looked at you know, they
(31:24):
kind of went everywhere.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
It was sort of.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
A diaspora for the Old Believers. Some of them just
went to other countries and seeking asylum or whatever. And
apparently some of them just looked to Siberia and were like,
no one's there, so we'll go there.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It sounds creepy though, the Old Believers.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Oh yeah, it's a terrible name for him. You know.
It seems like they could scan you or something to
make your head explode. Are they worship Cthulhu or something?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
So I almost feel like if we should look into
them a little more, because I think they could probably
hold up their own up.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
And I think he might be right.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
I also remember hearing about families that lived in the
Ozark Mountains in the midwest of the United States, I
think around Arkansas that had been out of contact, didn't
even know the Civil War had happened. They were just
that isolated. So yeah, you tend to think of as
just strictly indigenous peoples and that it's just in the Amazon,
(32:21):
but like, there's groups all over the world, fewer and
further between outside of the Amazon because there's less unpopulated areas.
But it happens.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
And one of the sad things about all of this
is for one of these other tribes that you know,
you can go read this cracked article.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
What's it called.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
I didn't see the title. Actually, it's just suddenly there
were oh, five isolated groups who had no idea that
civilization existed.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Crrarect lists were always so great, are always so great.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
They've come in handy from time to time.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
But one of the sad things they point out for
one of these other tribes is that in Peru, and
I imagine in some other South American countries, are these
awful things called human safaris where and they will take
tourists around to look at uncontacted tribes from afar and
close up.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
They're like, here, drain some of this iohusca through your nose,
and we're going to go check out some tribes hanging
out on a riverbank somewhere.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Man, so weird.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Well, I want to add one more thing. I came
across an article that wasn't really apropos of what we
were talking about, called the Right to Kill on Foreign
Policy Magazine, and it's about like this other tangential issue
that governments like Brazil have to deal with, which is, like,
some of these isolated groups practice things that the outside
(33:46):
world finds abhorrent or is illegal in the outside world. Specifically,
in this article, in fanticide, if you're born with the disability,
and I think about twenty of Brazil's isolated tribes, there's
a chance that the community will decide that you need
to die again. It's the practice of infanticide. And Brazil's like,
(34:08):
we are not quite sure what to do about this
because our constitution guarantees everyone in Brazil the right to live,
but it also guarantees the indigenous groups the right to
live according to their customs. So they have no idea
what to do. And it's a big thing about, you know,
moral relativism or moral absolutism and which one's correct. And
(34:28):
it's really interesting that they're having to think about this
right now. Yeah, for sure, it's a really interesting article.
Definitely worth reading.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Okay, I will check it out. Are you talking to me?
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Yeah, I'm talking to everybody, but specifically. Yeah. Well, if
you want to know more about isolated tribes, you can
look those words up anywhere on the internet and they're
going to deliver you some amazing stuff. And since I
said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Since you said amazing stuff, well look you here, dude,
I have a handwritten letter on construction paper.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Beautiful.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
That nice? Yes, I love it. Hey, guys, I hope
this finds you. Well. My name is Claire and I'm
twenty one.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
In fact, for my twenty first birthday, I came and
saw you guys live in Cleveland.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Awesome. That was a great show.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
It was.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I got to here in college and I'm studying mathematics
with a license and education, so I'll be teaching high
school math benefan since twenty fifteen. Thank you for the
many nights you have calmed me and all the information
I've learned. And I've been wanting to write for a
while just to say thanks and send appreciation, but also
a request and a little something. Whenever you talk about
(35:42):
math in any regard, please be more positive.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Please stop getting it wrong, Please be.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
More positive and encouraging. We're well known for poopoing math
and saying I hated math.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Well, it's so intimidating, it's just so stupid.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
It is, but she says this math is hard and
already has a stigma for people who hate it or
to hate it. But as a future educator, since you
too are sort of educators that reach a huge audience,
your outlook and attitude about math is important. It's okay
to not like math and think that it's hard, but
know that you and anyone can do math. I know
(36:19):
it's a silly thing to ask and point out, but
I think you could both have a positive impact on
the math stigma. I wish you and your wives and
Chuck your daughter all the best. Thank you for all
of your hard work, and thank Jerry too. Jerry has
to put up with you two all the time, so
she's definitely been working hard. And she writes sarcasm, smiley
face the fabulous day, and that is from Claire and Claire,
(36:42):
You're right, we just joke around, but we should take
more care with our words about the maths.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
You know what, Frankly, Chuck, I think miss Claire makes
a great point that we should just basically take all
the jokes out of our podcasts entire just so no
one takes it the wrong way. No, just make it
nice and neutral. She is right, though, she is right,
we should take it easy on.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Math, she very nicely said, back off math.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Yeah, like, did she draw little Yosemite sam at the
bottom there? She did? Oh? Yeah, look at that. Nice. Well,
if you want to get in touch with this, like
Claire did, you can go to your local post office.
We love that place. And you can also instead go
to the internet go to stuff youshould Know dot com.
Find all of our social media links there, or you
(37:32):
can send us a newfangled electronic mail by addressing it
to Stuff Podcasts and HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
Chuck here with a Saturday Select, bringing you one all
the way back from August twenty eighteen. A nice summer episode.
Who Is the Man of the Whole? This is very interesting.
The Man of the Holes was somebody who lived by
himself as an uncontacted human, well pretty much uncontacted. A
(00:25):
very interesting story. Sometimes I wish I was the Man
of the Whole. But check it out right now. Who
is the Man of the Hole? Welcome to Stuff You
Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. So I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Jerome Brolind. Boy,
I'm not in a good way today, Chuck, you off
your game, as if you can't tell I think you're fine. Well, thanks, man,
I feel a lot better. Sure, Yeah, no, I'm okay.
(01:07):
I can tell you. I'm I'm surrounded by friend's family.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Like your dad's in the corner. It's weird.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
I have the idea I have TV. Oh man. I
instagrammed a photo of my mom and dad from the seventies. Yeah,
and I captioned it They're like looking at each other
kind of lovingly and I captioned it the moment before
I was conceived.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
You know what Jerry showed me that today?
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Oh yeah, she did. I look a lot like my
parents mixed together. Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
The first thing I noticed was like, Wow, that's that's
what Josh would have looked like as a grown man
in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Because that profile.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Of your dad, I don't know, I've never seen your
dad young, So I was like, man, that's really that's you.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Yeah, I totally saw it. I saw both.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah. Yeah, because you look at my dad, You're like, oh,
that's Josh. But then you look at my mom, You're like, oh,
there's Josh too. Very bizarre.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah, I don't. I guess I definitely favor my father,
is that right?
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Yeah, So a lot of people just favor one or
the other. But I'm fifty to.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Fifty Yep, that's kay all fifty to fifty.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah, I think that's a new one.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
There's a T shirt, Yeah, fifty to fifty Clark.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
So, oh, I know the point I was making. There's
this House Stuff Works article that you sent called The
Man in the Hole, and it talks about this guy
who is the last of his kind, he's, as this
article put it, like the loneliest person on Earth. And
I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm sure this is
(02:47):
a lot like being in solitary confinement or something like that,
but no, this is way beyond that. And this house
stuff works article byes Lynn Shields like really drove it home.
She wrote, like, what if you were the last person
who could speak your language, the last person who remembered
what Halloween was, or a Coca cola, or that a
(03:09):
dog says wolf, Like, imagine that, And I'm like, yeah,
that's way different from being in solitary. Solitary confinement would
be bad enough. You know, you're physically restrained, but at
least you'd know out there that there are other people
who know the same things you know, that speak the
same language you speak, that your family's still out there,
(03:30):
that kind of thing. This is utterly different. And this man,
the last Tribesman he's called or the Man in the Hole,
is possibly not just the last of his kind. He
might be the only person on the entire planet in
the situation that he's in. Maybe isn't that bizarre to think?
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, I mean, we did another show on are There
Undiscovered People? Quite a few years back, and I don't
know how he didn't get to this guy, but I
saw this article and it was striking, especially if you've
seen the couple of videos, and I think there are
only two pieces of video of this dude. One I
saw where they were sort of shooting, you know, they
(04:15):
were zoomed in on a hut, and that's you know,
where he lives. There's a series of thatched huts in
the Tenaru Indigenous Reserve in the Rondonia state of Brazil, YEP.
About twenty thousand acres big area of the forest in jungle.
So he lives in these thatched huts that are scattered
(04:38):
about in the middle of nowhere, and they were able
to get him on film kind of zoomed in between
the cracks and you see the guy kind of looking
a little bit, but you can't make out much. So
I saw that video and then I saw another one
where it was a pretty good shot of him from
a distance making good work trying to chop down a tree.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
That was the most recent video, which well, let's just.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Go ahead and get into this.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
He was found or discovered in I think in nineteen
ninety six when some loggers from the State of Rondonia.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Which from the impression I have, this is a very
rough and tumble state populated by loggers and cattle ranchers,
and there are very few laws from what I understand,
and things are settled by the gun. Is the impression
that I have of Rondnia. It's right smack dab in
the middle of South America, and it's extraordinarily densely jungled
(05:37):
in the Amazon.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah, I mean that.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
One New York Times article, like the guy was talking
that they were talking to said, from a helicopter, you
look down there and you think there's just no one
down there.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
It's just all jungle, he said.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
But when you get down there, he said, there's a
lot of people and drug runners and bad men everywhere.
So this guy is definitely an anomaly because he is
not hanging out with anybody.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
No. And the reason why they think he's alone, Chuck,
is because back in nineteen ninety five nineteen ninety six,
when the rumors of like a wild man in the
jungle started to circulate, they think that he had just
recently survived a slaughter that had killed off the rest
of his tribe.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Which was only like supposedly five or six people by
that point, because they think the rest had been slaughtered
and't that that's a common thing We're going to come
up on in a couple of these is these ranchers
and loggers. They're like, we want to go clear this land,
and there's a tribe, a native tribe, they're an indigenous tribe,
so let's just slaughter them, get them out of the way.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
It's really, really an awful, awful thing.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
And it's been a very common thing apparently since the
seventies and eighties, when ranchers and loggers moved into Rondonia,
just snatching up land. And this is again, this is
the Amazon. This is basically Christine Forest rainforest that people
(07:07):
who have never been contacted by anyone from the outside
world live still to this day. And this guy's one
of them. So at first they thought maybe Hughes just
a member of a tribe that we already know about, right,
And then over time as they started to study this guy,
(07:27):
it became quite clear that now Hughes, he's a member
of a tribe that we didn't know about before, and
we're pretty sure he's the last of his kind.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Yeah, So there's this organization called Funai fu NAI, the
National Indian Foundation of Brazil, and they have been tasked
with for the past twenty years monitoring this dude, and
before his companions were killed, monitoring his companions. And you
(07:57):
sent a nice follow up on FUNAI. They have a
departments and one is called the General Coordination Unit of
Uncontacted Indians the CGII, and that was established in nineteen
eighty seven and they're the only a department of government
in the world which protects indigenous peoples who don't have
(08:18):
contact with the outside world or nearby tribes.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, because before in the nineteenth century and even through
a lot of the twentieth century, there was it was
just basically Christian missionaries who were making their way into
the Amazon to contact tribes and bring them Jesus basically,
and also healthcare and food and all that stuff tools
the implements of modern culture, but also to proselytize too,
(08:44):
and there was a lot of it just wasn't very
well thought out. And as a result, even from these
these the best of intentions that a lot of these
missionaries had a lot of tribes died. So in nineteen
ten Brazil came up with their I think it was
like the Indian Protection Services was the name of the
(09:05):
department that they first came up with, and the Indian
Protection Service they took over from the missionaries, and it
was a step up in that sense because it was
more coordinated. There was thought to it, there was some
sort of study, but the point was to take uncontacted
Amazonian tribes and bring them into the modern world so
(09:30):
that they could assimilate with the modern world. The point
was to basically reduce cultural diversity in Brazil and that
kept going until the sixties when there was a huge
ExPASy about the Indian Protection Service that they had just
fallen down so terribly in their mission that there was
(09:50):
basically mass extermination, slavery, rape, everything, every horrible thing that
you can think of that could befall a human being
happened to these tribes under the watch of the Indian
Services Protection over sixty years.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
The department in nineteen eighty seven, the CGII was founded
by a man named Sidney Posuelo. I guess how you
pronounced that. And this was a big sea change in policy,
which was, like you were saying, the previous strategy established
contact to try and get them integrated at some point
(10:29):
to this new policy, which was don't even contact these
people unless they are under serious threat, because history has
shown all manner of bad things can happen when you
contact these people, one of which is certainly introducing them
to new diseases and things that will kill them that
(10:53):
they've never never seen or experienced. And this is you know,
there's a big debate still on, like what the best
policies are here.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah, So these two American anthropologists, white American anthropologists, men
who I guess, wrote an open letter in either Science
or Nature, I think Nature, basically saying Brazil and Peru
should reverse this long standing policy of not contacting Indians
(11:28):
in the Amazon and should actually plan peaceful, well organized
contact so that they can be better protected. It's these
anthropologists stants that if you don't protect them, they're going
to die one way or another. That there's no way
that they're going to remain isolated. On the long term.
(11:50):
Maybe you've got another generation possibly of some of these
tribes that could live like this, but beyond that, it's
just not going to happen. There's too many power, powerful
interests banging on the doors of their preserved areas. Who
are more than willing to hire people who will accept
money to go kill these people just to get this land.
(12:10):
And by just leaving them alone, you're leaving them very vulnerable.
Whereas if you plan out contact, then conceivably you can
show them that there are things like medical treatment, there
is better ways that you can protect them. You can
kind of give them contact, and that even more so
interviews with groups that have become have initiated contact or
(12:33):
have had contact made with them said we would have
made contact with you guys earlier, but we thought we
were going to be enslaved or murdered or something. We
had no idea that you wanted to actually help us.
Had we known that, we would have contacted you guys
decades ago. So those two things put together, these American
anthropologists have said we endorse this, and fu NI and
(12:55):
a lot of other groups, including the UN and human
rights group in the UK called Survivors International, have said, no,
that is totally disrespectful, that flies completely in the face
of agreed upon procedure and protocol. Just be quiet, you're
being neo colonialists. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I think it's interesting though, because what they're trying to
do is, like you said, have very highly controlled contact,
and the assumption that they don't want to be contacted,
at least through their eyes, appears to be false because,
like you mentioned, they're afraid of being kidnapped or something
or overtaken. And if had they known, like, oh, you
(13:36):
just want to give us some nice tools and maybe
inoculate us, and we'd actually be.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Down with that as long as you leave afterward.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Right, And these two anthropologists said, like, you've got to
do this smartly, Like you basically have to go in
with cultural translators, usually tribes who have made contact with
outsiders before, already ablished contact that live in the same area,
who might be able to translate between the outsiders and
(14:07):
the actual uncontacted tribes. And you need healthcare providers who
are going to stay there for at least a year,
at least a year of sustained care or else. Yes,
they're going to die from these diseases you're going to
bring in inevitable.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Yeah, I mean they're good.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
They give good examples too in that article about how
this is backfired with missionaries, like the your people, they
were there for six months and the missionary said, well,
let's go on vacation and then the Yora died a
few weeks later, and then in nineteen seventy five, missionaries
provided care to a community on Ake community they took
(14:47):
a vacation and then they died as well. So they're
saying like, you got to have a plan to go
in and stay there. You can't just go in, bring
them some food and machetes and acculate like spring break,
and then then get out of there. But I get
the idea that this is still a pretty hot topic
of debate.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Oh yeah, no, that those anthropologists, they set off a
huge debate, and I think it was sparked by the
video that was released by Survivor International of the man
and the Hole chopping down a tree. And the video
was taken in twenty eleven, but they only just released
it in July of twenty eighteen. And this is, yeah,
(15:30):
this is very much still going on, this big debate
and it's a huge it's a huge issue and you
can kind of see both sides. Like I had just
read about Fooneye's counter to it that like, look, dude,
this is our thing. We got this. You just mind
your own business. We have our own policy, stay out right,
stay out of this. Yeah, But then if you read
(15:50):
the anthropologists letters, you're like, actually, they have a couple
of good points here. So it's it's not a clear
cut a picture, sure, one way or the other. It's
definitely there's a lot of nuance to it on both sides.
All Right, let's take a respite, let's take a furlough
or a vacation.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Yeah, and we'll come back and talk a little bit
more about the man in the hole.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
All right.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
So the reason they call him the man of the
hole or the man in the hole is the odd
thing of inside these thatched huts, of which he has
several around this area. Inside the huts are these and
all over the place there are these holes with like
spikes for like trapping animals. But he has these six
foot deep holes inside of his own huts, and apparently
(16:59):
no other tribes around him have done this, and it's
very unusual thing. And the belief is that he is
it's for his own protection. I guess if he's being
fired upon or something by loggers, he can jump down
on one of these holes.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Yeah, that's the impression I have too, which is extraordinarily sad.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It is.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
So the reason why they think that that he has
these holes is because he's had terrible run ins. I
guess this seems to be evidence that he is the
survivor of a slaughter or a massacre, because this is
not a normal technique that they've seen with other tribes,
and they found it at every single one of the
(17:41):
huts that they've come upon of his.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
They do know though, from tailing him or mon tailing him,
monitoring him for the past couple of decades though, that
he he hunts with a bone arrow. He farms probably
at night and stays out of the you know, as
much as he can. Stays inside during the day out
of fear, which is also awful. But he farms like
(18:04):
papaya and corn and other fruits and vegetables. He has
all these traps set everywhere. Like I mentioned, they have
found hand carved arrowheads, torches made from branches in Resin
And at one point they actually tried to make.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
Contact, yes, several points.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Well, at one point when they tried to make contact, though,
he fired upon them with his bow and arrow and
actually hit someone.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
In the chest, one of the food iye agents.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, and they were like, all right, we're out of here.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah. At that point they stopped trying to initiate contact
with this guy. And again, this is like peaceful contact
they're trying to initiate, not like hey man, get off
of this land. They're like saying, do you need anything?
Do you want some food? What do you want? And
the first few attempts to contact him resulted in him
(18:55):
just basically slipping into the shadows in the jungle and
just disappearing. Then it progressed into standoffs. Then it progressed
into a shooting, and so they stepped back. Survivor International
and FUNAI and some other groups stepped back and said,
this guy is escalating in hostilities. He's showing us he
(19:16):
doesn't want anything to do with us, like you. It
would be something if like he'd shot the first time
and then slipped away the second time and the hostilities
were decreasing, but instead it's going the opposite way. The
hostilities were increasing. So he's getting that he has the
opportunity to contact these people who are coming with their
(19:36):
hands up and like not trying to kill him, and
he's still saying back off. So finally the government said
we're just going to back off, and they backed off.
They FUNAI established his policy of not contacting this guy,
not even attempting to contact this guy, but instead monitoring him,
making sure that his preserve is protected, and then leaving
(19:59):
him things like the acts that he was seen using
in that twenty eleven video, or seeds for some of
the plants that he grows.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, which a lot of times he doesn't even accept
or take these gifts. Imagine he's not retrusting. And like
you said, as far as protecting the area, in two
thousand and seven, Funai and the government eventually increase the
area to thirty one square miles around where he was
is off limits to any trespassing or development, later expanded
(20:27):
to three thousand hectares.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So I think they added another three thousand.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Hectares, okay to the already square mileage.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
And this is really ticked off the ranchers and the
loggers because they're like, our business is being held back
by this one guy.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah, and they want to kill.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Him, to kill him. As a matter of fact, when
the government announced that it was not only keeping up
the practice of preserving this guy's land thirty one square miles,
but adding an extra three thousand hectares, which brought the
total to forty two and a half square miles or
one hundred and ten square kilometers that this man has
(21:05):
to himself. The five ranches that surround this preserve hired
somebody to go try to kill him. Yeah, Fu and
I went and checked on him after a couple of
weeks after that announcement was made public, and they found
that their outpost was ransacked and that they had found
the shotgun shells spent shotgun shells in the fourth floor.
(21:26):
So there's clearly an attempt to made on the guy's life,
and for a couple of years they had no idea
if he'd survived until that video was made in twenty
eleven that showed this guy who is now fifty. They've
been tracking him since he was in his third fifties.
Now they chopping down a tree. Yeah, chopping down a
tree like it's nothing. So they knew that he was
(21:47):
alive and in good health as of twenty eleven, and
they're assuming that he's still alive.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Man, how good would a movie be about this guy?
I know, just have a lot of it play out
in silence, you know.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Yeah, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
That would be cool.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I mean, it's it's crazy to see a video of
this guy from seven years ago. Like in the world
we live in, to think about there's still places on
earth where this guy it's almost like the Japanese straggler
who had no idea that the war had been over
for whatever thirty years living in the jungle. It's just
(22:21):
amazing to think about the fact that this is the
lone the lone guy out there by himself and what
his life must be like.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
But not only that, it's like like when we did
the paramedics episode, I think I said something like, there's
there's no greater symbol of humanity than paramedics, you know,
I think this is another really great symbol of paramedics
in this guy. Well. No, the Funai Brazilian government's response
to this that this man has been part of a tribe.
(22:52):
He's the last of his tribe, and the Brazilian government
has said, this man deserves to live his life out
in peace in the way that he he wants to,
in his traditional way, to be left alone. And we're
going to designate one hundred and ten square kilometers that
belong to no one but this man. Yeah, despite the
fact that all around him is the outside world trying
(23:13):
to press in. We're going to stand in the way
of that so that this guy can live out his
natural life. That just gets me, you know, right in
the bread basket.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, I think the Disney version of this movie is
they would find alone tribeswoman somewhere, drop her off and
have them have them meet cute by the papie tree.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah, and the ranchers want to tickle him. But if
it were live action these days, it would be they
would hire either John Wayne or Fisher Stevens to play
the last time.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Fisher Stevens.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Yeah, remember he played the Indian programmer in Short Circuit.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Really well, that's right, yeah, geez.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Yeah, that was as recently as the eighties.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Right, It's not like Mickey Rooney, you playing an Asian
man in the nineteen sixties. Not like that was any better. No, boy, Hollywood,
you've been getting wrong for so long.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
They have. At least Mongol got it right though, right maybe, Yeah,
we haven't seen him reserve judgment.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Should we take another break?
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, all right, We'll take another break and talk a
little bit more about some of these isolated tribes right
after this.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Okay, Chuck, So the last Tribesman, the man in the hole.
He's being left alone, and that's policy in Brazil and Peru.
From what I understand now, there are some tribes that
have actually accepted contact and have made peaceful contact and
(25:05):
have become I guess a little more integrated. I think
there's three degrees that FUNAI separates tribes into indigenous tribes
into there's totally uncontacted, which is like they are living
off on their own, they outside world has nothing to
do with them. There's partially contacted or partially assimilated, right,
(25:32):
like they're they're living in their hut in the jungle,
but they still have an iPhone, right. And then there's
fully assimilated, where they like live in a city now
or something like that, or they have like a job
in the city or something like that. So it's not
just in the Amazon. It's not just in Brazil where
there are uncontacted tribes, although that is definitely the place
(25:57):
where you're going to find the most. I think I
saw somewhere between fifty eighty and one hundred and twenty
uncontacted groups of indigenous people are presumed to be living
in the Amazon still today.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Yeah, I mean just those that random swath of numbers
shows you that they there's still so much they don't know.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
For sure, but there's there are other parts of the
world where there are uncontacted tribes, and you found an
article that ran down a few of them. One that
surprised me was just off the coast of India, on
Sentinel Island in India, North Sentinel, a.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Good ole cracked article which may have been done under
the watch of our now colleague mister Jack O'Brien. Nice
shout out to Jack and his daily Zeitgei, Zeitgei's podcast, Yeah,
which I was on.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Have you been on?
Speaker 1 (26:47):
You?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
You gotta be on. It's great, great fun. As a
matter of fact, I'm gonna lap you. I'm gonna go
on again.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Yeah, well please.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
Do all right?
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, But the sentine Leese on North Sentinel Island, Indiana,
they don't even know if that's their real name. They
just call them that because I guess we have called
it North Sentinel Island, not you and me, but other
people who.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Named it to I think the British.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
But apparently yeah, probably. We don't know a lot about them.
But in two thousand and six, a couple of fishermen
drifted there in their boat near the island and were
killed and buried in shallow graves, and helicopters came and
they were like, we got to find this burial site
and get these guys back at least, and they started
(27:33):
firing arrows at the helicopter and it was just out
of there, and the local cops were like, now, we're
just gonna leave those guys there, We're not going near it.
Speaker 3 (27:44):
They have actually for this has been going on for
a very long time. Apparently Marco Polo remarked on them,
wrote about them. He was traveling I think the twelfth
or thirteenth century, so they've been fierce for years now,
and apparently survived the two thousand and four tsunami. Yeah,
(28:04):
Indonesia's tsunami. That's crazy because this is an island that
the tsunami just swamped and they managed to hang on
just fine.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
I think ancient people have survived more than one tsunami,
you know.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
I guess you're right. That was a pretty bad one though.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
Yeah, pretty amazing. This other one, the coral Wai tribe
of Papua Indonesia. They were contacted in the seventies by
of course, missionaries and archaeologists, and they were using stone
tools and living in tree huts and stuff like that,
and their big belief as a tribe was that the
world would be destroyed by an earthquake if they assimilated
(28:43):
and changed their customs. So missionary said, all right, you
know what, We're just going to leave you alone.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
What I think these people might have invented bungee jumping?
Do you remember that land diving up isode them? They
sound really familiar.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
I think it might be maybe so, But they are
in the middle of nowhere, so it's a long way
from even like other remote villages.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Which is a I mean, that's a mark in your
favor for now. But as the Amazon Basin has been
showing us since the seventies and eighties, so much of
it has disappeared due to clear cutting for ranching, logging,
that you just have no idea how much longer that's
(29:30):
going to hold up, no matter where you are in
the world. Yeah, I mean, we're at seven and a
half billion people now, and then I think the next
thirty years we're expected to hit ten billion. That's a
lot more people that not only need more land, but
also are going to be using up those resources that
are currently on that land.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
Right now, you know, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
I mean, like, if they discover oil where the Krawai
tribe lives in Indonesia, there goes that isolation.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Yeah, probably so.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
I think that's a real danger for all tribes. I
think that's probably what those two anthropologists we're talking about.
They're saying, like, long term, we need a plan here everybody.
We can't just be like, well, we just won't contact
them because it's just not viable, I think was their point.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah, what about this one really was interesting to me.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
The Old Believers. Have you ever heard of them?
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Yeah, there's like some GQ article in the last couple
of years about that.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Are they well dressed it?
Speaker 3 (30:29):
I think so? In burlap apparently.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Yeah, these are Soviet Well, here's the deal.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
In nineteen seventy eight, there were these geologists in the
Soviet Union that we're looking for iron ore. They were
in a helicopter and they saw a cabin way out
in the remote areas of Siberia, and they found a
family there that actually spoke a language I guess, I mean,
what would that be.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
What language?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Old timey Russian?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Old timey Russian, uh huh.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
And they were huddled in fear and they were yelling,
this is for our sins. They were dressed in burlap
and living off the land. And apparently they were a
group of people called the Old Believers, which left the
Russian Church, the main Russian church in the seventeenth century
and had been I guess looked at you know, they
(31:24):
kind of went everywhere.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
It was sort of.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
A diaspora for the Old Believers. Some of them just
went to other countries and seeking asylum or whatever. And
apparently some of them just looked to Siberia and were like,
no one's there, so we'll go there.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
It sounds creepy though, the Old Believers.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Oh yeah, it's a terrible name for him. You know.
It seems like they could scan you or something to
make your head explode. Are they worship Cthulhu or something?
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
So I almost feel like if we should look into
them a little more, because I think they could probably
hold up their own up.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
And I think he might be right.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
I also remember hearing about families that lived in the
Ozark Mountains in the midwest of the United States, I
think around Arkansas that had been out of contact, didn't
even know the Civil War had happened. They were just
that isolated. So yeah, you tend to think of as
just strictly indigenous peoples and that it's just in the Amazon,
(32:21):
but like, there's groups all over the world, fewer and
further between outside of the Amazon because there's less unpopulated areas.
But it happens.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
And one of the sad things about all of this
is for one of these other tribes that you know,
you can go read this cracked article.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
What's it called.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
I didn't see the title. Actually, it's just suddenly there
were oh, five isolated groups who had no idea that
civilization existed.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Crrarect lists were always so great, are always so great.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
They've come in handy from time to time.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
But one of the sad things they point out for
one of these other tribes is that in Peru, and
I imagine in some other South American countries, are these
awful things called human safaris where and they will take
tourists around to look at uncontacted tribes from afar and
close up.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
They're like, here, drain some of this iohusca through your nose,
and we're going to go check out some tribes hanging
out on a riverbank somewhere.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Man, so weird.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Well, I want to add one more thing. I came
across an article that wasn't really apropos of what we
were talking about, called the Right to Kill on Foreign
Policy Magazine, and it's about like this other tangential issue
that governments like Brazil have to deal with, which is, like,
some of these isolated groups practice things that the outside
(33:46):
world finds abhorrent or is illegal in the outside world. Specifically,
in this article, in fanticide, if you're born with the disability,
and I think about twenty of Brazil's isolated tribes, there's
a chance that the community will decide that you need
to die again. It's the practice of infanticide. And Brazil's like,
(34:08):
we are not quite sure what to do about this
because our constitution guarantees everyone in Brazil the right to live,
but it also guarantees the indigenous groups the right to
live according to their customs. So they have no idea
what to do. And it's a big thing about, you know,
moral relativism or moral absolutism and which one's correct. And
(34:28):
it's really interesting that they're having to think about this
right now. Yeah, for sure, it's a really interesting article.
Definitely worth reading.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Okay, I will check it out. Are you talking to me?
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Yeah, I'm talking to everybody, but specifically. Yeah. Well, if
you want to know more about isolated tribes, you can
look those words up anywhere on the internet and they're
going to deliver you some amazing stuff. And since I
said that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Since you said amazing stuff, well look you here, dude,
I have a handwritten letter on construction paper.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
Beautiful.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
That nice? Yes, I love it. Hey, guys, I hope
this finds you. Well. My name is Claire and I'm
twenty one.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
In fact, for my twenty first birthday, I came and
saw you guys live in Cleveland.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Awesome. That was a great show.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
It was.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
I got to here in college and I'm studying mathematics
with a license and education, so I'll be teaching high
school math benefan since twenty fifteen. Thank you for the
many nights you have calmed me and all the information
I've learned. And I've been wanting to write for a
while just to say thanks and send appreciation, but also
a request and a little something. Whenever you talk about
(35:42):
math in any regard, please be more positive.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Please stop getting it wrong, Please be.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
More positive and encouraging. We're well known for poopoing math
and saying I hated math.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Well, it's so intimidating, it's just so stupid.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
It is, but she says this math is hard and
already has a stigma for people who hate it or
to hate it. But as a future educator, since you
too are sort of educators that reach a huge audience,
your outlook and attitude about math is important. It's okay
to not like math and think that it's hard, but
know that you and anyone can do math. I know
(36:19):
it's a silly thing to ask and point out, but
I think you could both have a positive impact on
the math stigma. I wish you and your wives and
Chuck your daughter all the best. Thank you for all
of your hard work, and thank Jerry too. Jerry has
to put up with you two all the time, so
she's definitely been working hard. And she writes sarcasm, smiley
face the fabulous day, and that is from Claire and Claire,
(36:42):
You're right, we just joke around, but we should take
more care with our words about the maths.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
You know what, Frankly, Chuck, I think miss Claire makes
a great point that we should just basically take all
the jokes out of our podcasts entire just so no
one takes it the wrong way. No, just make it
nice and neutral. She is right, though, she is right,
we should take it easy on.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Math, she very nicely said, back off math.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
Yeah, like, did she draw little Yosemite sam at the
bottom there? She did? Oh? Yeah, look at that. Nice. Well,
if you want to get in touch with this, like
Claire did, you can go to your local post office.
We love that place. And you can also instead go
to the internet go to stuff youshould Know dot com.
Find all of our social media links there, or you
(37:32):
can send us a newfangled electronic mail by addressing it
to Stuff Podcasts and HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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